


Echoes In The Dark

by Kemmasandi



Series: Flags [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Worldbuilding, prewar history
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 14:46:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1554128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kemmasandi/pseuds/Kemmasandi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack has a few important questions to ask of Optimus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Echoes In The Dark  
>  **Rating:** G  
>  **Continuity:** TF: Prime  
>  **Characters:** Jack Darby, Optimus Prime  
>  **Content Advisory:** Kem's history/worldbuilding geeks showing
> 
>  **Summary:** Jack has a few important questions to ask of Optimus.
> 
> Having a go at putting down some of my headcanons for the beginning of the war, in preparation for certain soon-to-be-begun projects. Might or might not have resulted from someone on tumblr criticising my precious babbies. XD I am a staunch Autobot supporter at heart, and there don't seem to be too many of those around...
> 
> Also my first go at writing from Jack's perspective. Of all the kids he's the one I have the hardest time writing – which is interesting, because he's probably the most like me. :B
> 
>  **Word Count:** 3745

…

_turn our sorrow and anger into strengths_

_our future is right there beside us_

…

ECHOES IN THE DARK

Jack came out of the front door at a run, taking the forecourt steps three at a time. The street outside Jasper Memorial High was largely empty, meaning that there were only a few rural kids waiting for the final bus to see him skid to a halt on the sidewalk and look around, perplexed.

World History had run late, and it was closer to four than half past three. Ordinarily Arcee would be there on the kerb, front wheel pointedly angled toward the road. She liked to be punctual. Much like Jack himself, he thought, rubbing the back of his head. Where was she?

Jack dug his phone out of his pocket, intending to text someone at the base. A nearby foghorn blast knocked it out of his hand.

He looked up. A red and blue truck, chrome finishings shining in the sunlight, rolled around the corner and came to a neat halt at the side of the road. It sat there, patiently idling. One window rolled down. The cab was dark.

Jack hurriedly snatched his phone up off the concrete and jogged across the road. “Optimus? Is that you?”

The passenger side door opened. Jack peeked in.

Optimus' holoform blinked at him from the driver's seat. “Arcee has been otherwise engaged. Since I was in the area, I volunteered to collect you.” He was black-haired and middle-aged with a scruffy beard and deep-set blue eyes, apparently copied from a trucker Optimus had once seen on a TV documentary. He copied the trucker's languid human body language with startling accuracy. “I apologise for the wait.”

“No, it's okay, I only just got out of class.” Jack lifted his bag into the cab and climbed up after it. “Vince was being an a— uh, stupid, and the teacher kept us all in because of him. Um, thanks for the ride.”

“It is no problem,” said Optimus gravely. His engine roared and he pulled away from the sidewalk.

Rides back to the base with Arcee were generally punctuated with idle talk. She was genuinely interested in the minutia of Jack's life, how his schooling went and what he was learning. She wasn't afraid to comment on it, either. She didn't like to talk about her own educational experiences – memories of a better time too painful to bring up, Jack supposed – but she seemed to enjoy poking her nonexistent nose into his business. At this stage, he'd be lying if he said he minded it.

Optimus on the other hand seemed content to let the silences stretch on. He dissolved the holoform as soon as they passed the city limits, and Jack was left alone in the cab.

Jack sat back in his seat and tried not to fidget.

Was it just him, or did Optimus seem a little... different? It hadn't been long since he'd been rescued from the clutches of the Decepticons. Not that he'd ever been the cuddliest of people, but since then he'd seemed to drift around the base like a particularly severe ghost. It looked from the outside as though his thoughts were a long way away and his actions took several seconds to bridge the gap. He spent most of his time out on patrols or cloistered in the medbay with Ratchet.

 _He lost his memories and was claimed as a Decepticon by Megatron himself,_ Jack thought. _King 'Con played him like a fiddle. That would rattle anybody's composure._

He found himself wondering how Optimus and Megatron had ever considered one another friends. They were so different, Optimus courteous and kind while Megatron was ruthless and bombastic.

Yet Ratchet had been sure of what he was saying. Resentful, perhaps, but certain.

“Hey, uh... Optimus?” Jack blurted out.

The silence seemed to shatter. He felt Optimus' attention focus on him as if it were a physical touch. “Are you okay?” he continued. In for a penny, in for a dollar.

Optimus did not answer. The lights on the dashboard flickered on and off in a sharp pattern. Self-consciousness closed in over Jack's head.

“I'm sorry, that was a stupid question,” he said. A nervous laugh escaped him.

The engine rumbled. “There are no stupid questions,” said Optimus gently, “and I am grateful for your concern.”

“Pretty sure there are at least some stupid questions.” Jack let out a deep breath and mentally smacked himself. Optimus hadn't answered in either positive or negative. That spoke volumes.

“Perhaps. That, however, was not one of them.” The dashboard lights turned green. Jack hadn't ridden with Optimus before, but Bumblebee often did the same thing when he wanted to reassure his passengers. “Your concern for those around you is a trait to be greatly respected.”

Jack gave the dashboard a half-hearted smile. How did they see in vehicle form, anyway? “Thanks, Optimus.”

There was a low-frequency rev from the engine as Optimus shifted gears at the top of a shallow ridge. “Now, it seems I must return the concern. You seem nervous, Jack. Your heart rate is elevated above normal and your electromagnetic fluctuations are disrupted. Are you feeling unwell?”

Jack opened his mouth, then closed it. There was an audible snap. “You can tell all of that?”

“Yes. Any of us could.” Optimus watched him for a moment. “We are equipped with comprehensive environmental scanners in order to navigate efficiently while in alt-mode. It just so happens that they are also fair equipment with which to monitor your vital signs, given that your specifications are so different from ours.”

Oh God. No wonder Arcee had known about his not-so-little crush on Sierra right from the start. Jack closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids for a moment. Embarrassed warmth spread across his face.

“I'm fine,” he said, breathing deep. He dug in his backpack for his water bottle, as much to distract himself as for something to drink. “I've just got a few things on my mind, that's all.”

“Hm,” Optimus said – the same noise he used whenever Ratchet went off on one of his semiregular tirades or Miko said something particularly outlandish. “We have a few miles to go yet. If it is anything I can help with, I would be glad to do so.”

Jack pulled the cap off the bottle and glanced at the steering wheel. It swung gently left as the road curved around a dry gully. Optimus' accelerator light – or the light that would be the accelerator in a normal truck – glowed serene green.

_\- Orion Pax's face twisted with anguish at the approaching form of the warlord. Jack saw something of the effort it must have cost him to approach in the longing cant of those impossibly large optics. He knelt, urgency in every line of his frame. He met Jack's gaze, searching for answers – what must I do, what can I do?_

_“Are you sure I am worthy?” Because he didn't feel he was; Jack could tell -_

“Um,” he said, very articulately. “If you're okay with it. I don't want to pry into your history.”

Optimus was quiet for a long moment. Jack drank the last of his water. Oh, this had been a bad idea.

Then, Optimus spoke. “We may have had the same few things on our minds.”

His voice was quiet, grave. Jack took a deep breath, tried to say something, closed his mouth as he realised he had absolutely no words to express it.

“Well,” he said, feeling like he'd just stepped up in front of his English class to give a presentation he hadn't had any time to study for. “Yeah. Ratchet told us a few things while you were... away. About the beginning of the war. And... well, I don't know, I was just wondering what Megatron was all about before the war.”

“I see,” said Optimus, softly. “Was there anything in particular which you wanted to know?”

Jack shifted in his seat, glanced out the window. Blue sky, earthy landscape flashed past. “Ratchet said that you and Megatron had been friends, and that you worked together up until the Council made you Prime. It... sounds like an odd partnership.”

“It very much was,” said Optimus, and with only the tone of his voice to lend context to his words Jack thought he detected a wry twist. “Under the social dictum of the times, we should never have met each other. Although I was middle-caste rather than high-caste, he was what we knew as the 'Untouchables', the lowest of the low.”

Jack furrowed his brow. “Why was that? That sounds kind of... shitty, to be honest.”

Optimus made a noise that might have been assent. “During the Golden Age of Cybertronian history, the latest years of which I lived through, the caste system governed our social interactions. There were many hundreds of castes, local and global, which were arranged into eight tiers of rank. My caste, the Iacon record-keepers, was of the fourth tier. Megatron's personal history is not something anyone but him known much of, but what is known is that he was at one time an indentured worker in the mines of the Kaon badlands. A slave, essentially. I do not know how he freed himself, but from that moment forth he would never have been accepted into any higher caste; background checks would have shown any potential legal employer his history, which would then have forced them to return him to his former owners.”

“Oh, man.” Jack sat back and pillowed his arms behind his head. “That really is shitty. Uh, crappy.”

“Solid excrement?” Optimus observed, his voice absolutely neutral. “Ah. The sentiment becomes clear.”

Jack bit his lip to stop himself from laughing. “Uh, sorry about that.”

“It is of no consequence,” Optimus dismissed. “I hear far worse from your guardian.”

“Well, yeah.” Jack closed his bag up again and put it into the footwell. “I'll find a different word.”

“You have my thanks,” said Optimus.

They drove into the shadow of a mesa. Jack blinked a few times, his eyes readjusting from the glare of the Nevada sunlight. “So... Ratchet seemed like there was a lot he wasn't saying. He definitely left the whole slave thing out, for example. Did he know that?”

“Yes, Ratchet is aware of Megatron's personal history.” Optimus sounded almost indulgent, like promising to bring Raf a snowball from the Arctic. “There is no finer medic than Ratchet, and I count him my dearest friend, but he does have very good reason to be biased against the Decepticons and everything they touch.”

“Yeah?” Jack said. “I mean. Not that it's any of my business, but more so than usual?”

“You will have to ask him yourself if you wish to know the details, as it is not my story to tell.” Optimus paused, letting the words hang in the air for a moment. “There is a word for the Kaoni Undercity which seems relevant. The Pits – derived from the many smelting pits which occupy it. This is also the near-universal term for our Hell, the place from which come demons and evil of every magnitude. Megatron as he was then was not evil, per se. He was ruthless, pragmatic, vindictive and violent – the Pits would not have been survivable otherwise. He was subjected to injustices and tortures designed to break even the strongest of mecha, but he rose from them unbowed and he determined to defeat the forces which drove them, almost as an act of personal revenge.”

“That does sound like him,” Jack muttered.

Optimus made a small noise, barely audible over the smooth roar of his engine. “He did not intentionally gather followers at first. He was entering into the world of the gladiators, neither of which were environments in which he could afford distractions of any sort. His frametype is warbuild – I wonder why any mining company would commission such a mech. I have seen video records of some of his earliest matches. He was not skilled nor quick to pick up on his natural combat instinct, but he had, and still has, a force of personality so intense and ferocious that it seems he won fights against combatants older and more experienced than he by that alone.”

_\- “I never forget a face,” said Megatron, and even from that height Jack could feel the weight of his attention pressing down on him, prickling at the back of his neck and dragging at his shoulders until he could ignore it no longer, turning around and meeting the giant's gaze head-on. “Even that of a human.” -_

Jack rubbed his neck, banishing the memory. “I can believe that.”

“Over time he honed that charisma and intensity into a weapon,” Optimus said wryly. “He was not then as he is now.”

“What's different, then?” Jack frowned at the windscreen. A mile post flashed past on the side of the road. “How did the war start? How did it go from freedom and equality to taking over planets and all that?”

“To be absolutely fair, he has done little that the Cybertronian Empire before him had not,” said Optimus. “In the process of building our empire, the Senate authorized the colonization of many planets, in manners both peaceful and forceful. Many of those subjugated by force were stripped of their resources and their inhabitants enslaved. For all that we called ourselves an enlightened race, our Golden Age was built upon rampant xenophobia and slavery, both of alien species and of our own kind. Ironically, in destroying the one system, Megatron became the successor of the other.

“When I first met him, I was not young. I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about our world and its systems. In my position as an archivist, I saw more data relevant to our lives pass my desk in an orn – a day on Cybertron, I mean to say – than most mecha did in years. I came across Megatron's first writings that way. I was intrigued. He was a gladiator, a former miner; his words, although earnest and very much believed, were nowhere near as confident as his ideas. I watched him grow from my comfortable position in Iacon. Eventually I made contact with him, believing in his ideals and confident that I could offer him something. Yet in our first meeting, I was made very aware of my own naivety. I was shown the stark realities of the life which he and so many others lived.”

Optimus hummed shortly, the sound reverberating around the cab. “It was both terrifying and shaming. Seeing oppression and, yes, torture which I had if unknowingly been complicit in. I had thought I knew how the system worked. I had been very wrong. I considered running away, going back to Iacon and pretending that nothing was wrong, as I think everyone expected me to. In the end, however, I wanted to prevent people from suffering more than I wanted to preserve my own comfort. I gave Megatron my support, however he felt he could use it.”

“And you worked together to change Cybertron for the better,” Jack said, lining the story up with Ratchet's version of events.

“Yes, we did,” Optimus said. He rolled down the driver's side window for a moment, and fresh air rushed into the cab. “We became friends, after a time. I visited him in Kaon many times, and learned to see those who lived around him as people, a lesson I have resolved never to forget. Although I was only of the fourth rank, I was able to lend his movement political legitimacy among the middle castes. I had great hopes of being able to persuade enough mecha of the inherent justice of our movement that the transition between governments would be bloodless.”

“Did you really think you had a chance of that?”

Optimus went quiet again, but by now Jack was beginning to catch on that it meant he was simply gathering his thoughts.

“Megatron thought that a revolution without spilled energon would not have the strength to establish itself. I worried that he was right, but I believed with all my spark that we should try even so. In the beginning he seemed as though he might listen to me, but as time went by he became less and less inclined to put the resources towards an effort he was convinced had far less chance of success. I threw myself into peaceful protest with equal fervor, hoping to prove otherwise to him. In the end I managed to bring the matter to the attention of the Senate, and through that to the Council itself.”

Jack interrupted for a moment. “So the Council outranks the Senate?” He nodded at Optimus' assurance. “How did you do that? You said you were only middle-caste.”

“Fortunately I had friends in higher castes,” Optimus explained. “Ratchet was one. There was another whom was ranked even higher, and whom, like myself, had taken an interest in Megatron's movement. She approached me with the opportunity to make my case before the Public Interests Bureau, which was an organization within the global government dedicated to managing social development in specific cases. At the time scheduled, Megatron was not able to come to Iacon to attend, so I, desperate to make good use of such an unexpected gift, offered to represent him.”

“It... doesn't actually sound to me like Megatron was all that interested in getting it vetted,” Jack observed. “Am I wrong?”

“I do not know for sure,” Optimus replied. The accelerator light turned yellow and blinked mournfully. “I told myself at the time that he likely had other, equally important things to be organizing. Neither can I blame him for being very suspicious and doubtful of the government's goodwill towards us, given his experiences in life. The legitimacy of a liberation movement is not judged by the approval of those it seeks to be liberated from. However, had we worked together to gain a foothold within the Council, we might have given ourselves the base from which to launch a quick revolution rather than this bloody and protracted civil war.

“When I returned to the Senate to present our case to them, Megatron came with me. He was after all our leader; I gladly yielded the floor to him. What I saw then very much shocked me.

"I am familiar with Ratchet's version of events, in which he asserts that Megatron then declared his intentions of taking power by force – I can assure you that this is not exactly what took place. The mecha of the Senate and Public Interests Bureau questioned him for hours, under which he steadily grew clearly more infuriated and his answers more sharp and inclined towards the implication of violence. I realised after a while that this was not accidental – they were intending to provoke exactly those reactions. When Megatron mentioned claiming the Matrix for himself, it was bitter sarcasm – I don't believe he ever wanted to be the Prime; he was far too proud of his origins to accept what he saw as the tool of the Council – but it was taken up by the Senate as yet another way in which to smear his character.”

Optimus gave a quiet sigh, dislodging puffs of Nevada dirt through the vents on his dashboard. “I stepped in where I could to protest. I now know that that was exactly what they were hoping I would do.

“At the end of the proceedings, the Council asked to see us in private. I followed Megatron into the room, and I confess I was frightened that either Megatron would lose his temper and attempt to tear the Council apart himself, or that the Council would act first and have us both imprisoned for the rest of our lives. Instead, they asked me a few questions: why had I given Megatron my support, what I thought would be the best way forward for Cybertron, what I would do if I had the power to influence that best way forward. I answered to the best of my ability. Halfway through I noticed Megatron staring at me. His expression was taut and his optics were wide; it was as if he had never seen me before, and he did not like what he saw.

“I experienced a moment of clarity then. I saw that the Council would not listen to either of us, or the multitude of people which we represented. As I spoke, I realised that Megatron knew what the Council were intending to have me do, and that regardless of my prior efforts on his behalf he did not trust me to turn down the power they were about to offer me, no matter what that power could have done for us. He saw only the machinations of the Council, and the corrupt and bloated power system to which they held the reins.”

Omega One emerged from behind a passing mesa. Jack realised he'd stopped breathing and inhaled shallowly.

Optimus continued, his voice noticeably subdued. “The Council offered me the Primacy. I somehow gathered the strength with which to accept. Megatron did not say anything, which was in some ways worse than if he had raged and attacked me. He simply turned around and strode out of the room.”

Jack patted the seat, in lieu of having anything comforting to say. His hands shook, a sympathetic nervous reaction. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Optimus.

They drove off the end of the sealed road in silence. The holograph over the entrance tunnel flickered out of existence, and then they were in, sunlight shining in over the threshold behind them. The tunnel curved in into the main hangar. Ratchet was at the ground bridge controls, Raf and Miko hanging over the mezzanine railings to watch him work.

Optimus came to a leisurely halt in the middle of the hangar. “That was, essentially, the event which started the war. Others, some arguably more important, came afterwards, but their eventuation depended on the outcome of the meeting with the Senate.” He opened the passenger door.

Jack grabbed his bag and hopped out of the cab. “Thanks for the ride,” he said again. “And thanks for talking to me about this.”

Optimus transformed and knelt. A hint of a smile played about his mouth.

“You are welcome on both accounts. And, should you have any further questions, I would be happy to answer them. History is something of a specialty of mine, you see.”

**Author's Note:**

> I really like the idea that Jack might have adopted some of Miko's mannerisms and terms after a while. My headcanon Jack is a very people-oriented person, although more on terms of organization and care than friendship,. He probably catches himself doing it sometimes and smacks himself over the forehead XD But it happens! And it's just a part of who he is.
> 
> As for the Cybertronian central government, it is composed of the Executive Council, AKA the Council everyone in TFP refers to, a thirteen-member board comprised of first-tier politicians, most of them Alpha Towersmecha; below that is the Senate, a 56-member committee which produces the things the Council acts on. Off to the side somewhat is the House of Representatives, consisting of the Governors of the Cybertronian states; some Governors are also members of the Senate whereas some are not. Then there's the External Representatives (Governors of offworld colonies), the Executive Court (legal branch of the Senate, makes laws) and the Public Interests Bureau (operative branch of the Senate, makes sure everyone is toeing the line). There are a lot of individual ministries, but they all come subordinate to those.


End file.
